Saturday 24 March 2018

Living with a gifted child - the beginning

As cliched as it sounds my son was different from the very beginning. Even in hospital after he was born he was very alert, he never liked to lie down or sleep. I can remember going to post natal physiotherapy classes, all the other children were sat happily in their maxi cosi but he could never sit through a whole session even through he had fiddle toys. He wanted to move and do something, he was interested it what was going on. He even tried to comfort another baby who was crying by patting their hand. My son was always active and he did not like to sleep.

People continually debate nature v nurture and I often feel I get the 'blame' for my son's advanced development. Of course we can do things to enhance or hinder our child's development but I still believe that certain things are intrinsic to your child.

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how I would bring my child up but as I am dyslexic I decided two specific things.  I decided to give a running commentary about what I could see and what I was doing from the day he was born, as I know many dyslexics often have delayed speech.  I always spoke to him as if he was another person who understood what I was saying long before he could speak or respond for himself. I used the proper terms for things like 'bamboo' and 'roses' as we walked around our neighbourhood. Imagine my shock when at 22 months he said 'Look condensation' pointing at a window covered in condensation!
 
My other decision was to read to him every night as soon as he could sit up and focus on the book. I did this from the age of 6 months, again I didn't worry about whether he could understand what I was saying. I just went ahead and read the story and talked about the pictures. I did this because I thought it might encourage his love of reading and reading skills and compensate for any dyslexic traits he might have. Strangely enough by the age of 2, he had progressed to an encyclopedia, which I had to read 2 pages of every night before he went to sleep. When he was 3, I read him the Wizard of Oz a chapter at time each night. By then he was articulate enough to talk about the characters and he understood that each character asked for the characteristics they already had.

By the age of 2 he knew the alphabet, as my husband sang the alphabet song while he changed his nappy. By 2 and a half he knew all the letter sounds as we played 'I spy' in the car. He would point out letters in the environment.  I still remember being a shopping centre when he was 22 months and he said 'look mum there's a Z' as he saw the ZARA shop sign. By 3 and a half he had started to learn to read as he had memorised whole books so that he could pretend to read and he was constantly asking what words said.

Many people think we must have 'hot housed' our child but I have to say that the things it always felt like our son was the driving force rather than us. It was exhausting because he was so active and once he could talk he never stopped. Most activities we did were just the things he wanted to do and many of them we discovered by accident. Like his love of archeology which started because my father in law was watching 'Time team' while my son was playing. My son became fascinated by digging for artefacts in the garden and pretended to find Roman pottery. He joined the young archeological society and found out as much as he could about history.  When he was about 4, he woke up one morning and his first comment of the day was to ask me if the Egyptians had hypocausts like the Romans.  These sort of questions came thick and fast at any time of day and in any situation and an immediate answer was expected.

So what do you do? Ignore your child, tell them they are too young to know about or do these things, force them to play with age appropriate toys? Or let yourself be swept along with 'the force of nature' which is part an parcel of a gifted child. I believe most parents in the same situation, would answer their children's questions and look for interesting activities and books for their child.

The lack of understanding from other parents is the hardest part to deal with, alongside not being able to share the joy of your child's achievements with friends and family.  Having to try to 'hide' your child's abilities and interests and guarding what you say and share is very tiring.  At the same time you are struggling to meet your child's needs, are exhausted by their constant activity and are worrying about whether you are doing the right thing. But you are completely isolated and no one has any sympathy for you, as surely it is easy to have such a bright child?

Friday 23 March 2018

Twice Exceptional: The Problems of Misdiagnosis

Twice Exceptional: The Problems of Misdiagnosis: A lack of understanding of the full range of characteristics of gifted children (and adults) by parents, professionals and teachers can ...

Thursday 22 March 2018

Saturday 17 March 2018

Twice Exceptional: Stealth Dyslexia

Twice Exceptional: Stealth Dyslexia: Have you heard of Stealth Dyslexia? So many people are affected by dyslexia but many do not benefit from interventions because they do no...

Tuesday 13 March 2018

Twice Exceptional: Recognising working memory difficulties

Twice Exceptional: Recognising working memory difficulties:   Graphic from Examined Existence One of the main difficulties that dyslexic people have is with their working memory . This difficu...

Sunday 11 March 2018

Friday 9 March 2018

Twice Exceptional: The Hidden Dyslexic

Twice Exceptional: The Hidden Dyslexic: As students get older many will try to disguise their difficulties.  As I know from my own experience it is all about trying to control o...

The challenge of writing

One of the reasons I am so passionate about early identification is that if dyslexia is not spotted early then many other difficulties arise. Often the child is mislabeled and the support and interventions that would have helped to overcome their difficulties are not provided.

As these children learn to compensate for their difficulties not all the strategies they use are positive. Very often children will find ways of opting out of literacy tasks. Children will pretend that they don't want to do a task rather than not being able to do the task..... "This is boring!", "Its too easy!", "Its babyish!" Teachers and adults then focus on the behaviours rather than what is causing the behaviour. In my experience teachers still find it puzzling when a child can verbally explain answers and show a real understanding of concepts but then struggle to write a few 'simple' sentences.  But this is not an unusual profile.

Writing is a complex process and if any of the many building blocks are weak, it will be a struggle. There is the physical process of writing - gripping the pencil,  remembering the correct orientation and letter formation. Then you need to be able to spell the words or at least be able to make a phonetically pausible attempt and you have the 200 odd irregular high frequency words to contend with.  Next you need to formulate an idea and which idea should go first? And you can't just write how you speak or think, you need to consider the genre, audience and purpose before composing a sensible sentence with an opener and a connective. Oh and don't forget to pick your best vocabulary...don't use 'said' or 'big' or 'nice'.  Finally you need to keep the whole sentence in your head while you write it down.  Easy - right ?!

Of course there are many children who pick up these skills quickly and easily and as an adult we hardly think about the writing process as most of it is automatic for us.  However for a dyslexic child there can be a breakdown in any area and very often in more than one area.  Writing then becomes a very hard and laborious process. If our mental energy is taken up on physically writing there is no energy for formulating sentences. If you have to think about the spelling of nearly every word again their is no energy left to think of ideas or creative vocabulary or even punctuation.

It all sounds obvious, but teachers are now so programmed to push writing and particularly creative, independent writing that they forget that without strong underlying skills writing can be a nightmare!
They start to think the dyslexic child is being lazy or difficult.

We have all been in situations where we feel overwhelmed by a task or situation.  I can remember attending a teacher training course in French.  Although I have functional French, I do not know 'educational' French. Understanding French is not an automatic skill for me. So after a couple of hours of focusing hard and coping, suddenly my brain was overloaded and I could no longer follow anything. Luckily no one asked me any questions or put me on the spot and I could just let the information wash over me.



Imagine if this was your daily experience, overloaded and struggling to keep up......
Many dyslexic students are given tasks every day, even every lesson that are actually beyond them. They do not have enough automatic skills to successfully complete writing tasks. And so they are overloaded.

The best way to support dyslexic students is to honestly evaluate their skills in each aspect of writing. In any writing task a child should only have to focus hard on one skill, the others should be automatic or supported. For example if a child struggles with the physical process of writing, consider scribing for the child or using a computer so they can focus on vocabulary and composition.  If the child struggles with spelling provide a word list of key words for the task in front of them.  If the child struggles with remember their ideas, a teacher could record them on Post its or a whiteboard.  'Talk tins' could be used to record a sentence so the child can play back their idea while they write each word down.

Weaker skills need to be worked on in isolation and over a longer period of time through interventions and daily practice. While the skills are developing scaffolds and adaptions must be made for a dyslexic student to succeed.


Sunday 4 March 2018

Dyslexic Myths - Part 1




Try my quiz which I often use during my staff training on dyslexia. All the statements are based on comments I commonly hear from both teachers and parents.

Can you work out which are true and which are common misconceptions about dyslexia?


True or False ?  Dyslexic or not?
1. He confuses b and d so he must be dyslexic
2. She can’t be dyslexic because she can sound out and decode words
3. His brother is dyslexic so I think he is probably dyslexic too
4. She’s always forgetting where she has left her PE kit
5. He has a good memory- he remembers all sorts of things we do as a family

How did you do? Click read more for the answers